Gaiman, Shakespeare and the Question of Authorship

Master’s Degree programme

in European, American and Postcolonial

Languages and Literatures

(D.M. 270/2004)

Final Thesis

Gaiman, Shakespeare and

the Question of Authorship

Supervisor

Ch. Prof. Laura Tosi

Assistant supervisor

Ch. Prof. Loretta Innocenti

Graduand

Serena Marasca

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ONTENTS

I

1.

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1.1. Gaiman’s biography 6

1.2. Adapting Shakespeare for Young Adult audience 12 1.2.1. What is Adaptation and why do we adapt 12 1.2.2. “What’s in a name?”: a brief history of Shakespeare’s fame

through adaptations 14

1.2.3. Shakespeare for the Young 20

1.3. A dance between the visible and the invisible: the graphic novel as an

in-between land 26

1.3.1. Definition and introduction to the medium 26 1.3.2. A brief history of the graphic novel 31

1.3.3. Shakespeare in graphic novels 35

2.

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2.1. The land of the Dreaming: an introduction to The Sandman’s

universe 38

2.1.1. The Endless 38

2.1.2. The plot 49

2.2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Sandman #19 54

2.3. The Tempest: The Sandman #75 66

3.

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3.1. Neil Gaiman and Postmodernism 75

3.1.2. Storytelling: stories and metafiction 79 3.1.3. Worlds within worlds within worlds 83

3.2. The question of identity 88

3.2.1. Dream, an atypical hero 88

3.2.2. “A willing vehicle for the great stories”: Shakespeare as man

and writer 90

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OTE ON THE TEXT

All the quotations from the Shakespearean plays inside this dissertation are taken from the following editions:

• Shakespeare, W. (2008). A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Shakespeare, W. (2008). The Tempest. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

I

NTRODUCTION

Through the centuries, in literature, the question of authorship has always held a central yet peculiar place. The relationship between authors and their literary work has always been complicated, especially because it does not revolve exclusively around these two elements. In fact, three separate aspects must be taken into account: the writer, the voice of the narrator inside the work and the public reception of that specific work. From the second half of the twentieth century, literary critics have debated upon the very concept of the author, some of them considering it “dead”, as Barthes (1967, 142) declared, in order for the reader to move to the centre of critical attention and others following Foucault, who problematised the idea of the author and created the “author-function” (1969, 305). In any case, the meeting point of these criticisms was that the writer was just a gateway for external influences (mostly the historical, cultural, economic and social context she or he lived in) and the literary work ought to be considered separately from its creator, thus creating a gap between the two.

Neil Gaiman tackles that gap and uses it in order to create a brand-new character out of a very well-known real-life (if dead) author: William Shakespeare himself. Playing with the little information there is on his life, Gaiman moulds Shakespeare the writer into Shakespeare the character in his graphic novel, The Sandman. Through the Bard, Gaiman tries to untangle the increasingly complicated feelings he has towards his work: The Sandman brought him under the public spotlight, but along with that came all the problems of fame. After Stephen King gave him the advice of enjoying what he was working on, Gaiman became overly anxious about it instead: “I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story. There wasn’t a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn’t writing something

in my head, or wondering about it. And I didn’t stop and look around and go, This is really fun.” (Gaiman, 2016, 494) Hence, inside the graphic novel, the reader can detect this increasing concern through Shakespeare’s character, portrayed as a writer at the beginning of his career. He is presented in issue 12 of A Doll’s House, Men of Good Fortune, while he is speaking to a young Kit Marlowe at the peak of his success, but then Gaiman dedicated another two issues entirely to his plays. Issue 19, A Midsummer

Night’s Dream, and issue 75, The Tempest, which is also the closing chapter of

the whole series, are not only a retelling of Shakespeare’s plays but also provide an insight into the fictional life of the greatest author of all time. By the end of the series, Shakespeare appears to be consumed by the life he led (or did not lead, to be more accurate), constantly torn between what is real and what is imaginary, between the world inside his head and the one outside it.

The outcome of Gaiman’s operation of adaptation is then twofold: on one hand, he takes Shakespeare as an inspiration, paying his homage through the reworking of his plays, but on the other he also manages to humanise him, to claim him back to his own world, making the Bard step away from that high shelf where the literary canon and criticism have confined him.

When it comes to adaptations, and particularly Shakespearean ones, two different problems arise. The first concerns the Western idea of Shakespeare as untouchable, the Zeus in the Olympus of writers, representing lofty English literature as a whole: he “is rarely presented as simply a writer. Rather he is shaped and interpreted by cultural forces, so he is always modern but always eternal.” (Castaldo, 2004, 95) The second issue focuses on the problem of originality. As a matter of fact, Sanders claims that “Shakespeare was himself an adapter and an imitator, an appropriator of myth, fairy tale, folklore, the historical chronicles of Holinshed, and the prose fiction and poetry of his day, as well as classical text by Ovid and Plutarch.”

(2016, 59) Therefore, the allegedly original source (Shakespeare in this particular instance) is actually a patchwork of pre-existing literature. The issue of originality then shifts from the adapter to the adapted, focusing on the idea of what “original” literature means, both as something completely new that stands out on its own and as something that gives origin to something else entirely. But is it possible to imagine a literary work without its literary predecessors?

Gottschall refers to the humankind as “homo fictus” (2012, xiv), differentiating it from the homo sapiens sapiens as a superior ape. According to his view, human beings are storytelling animals: it is impossible to think of people without inscribing their life into a narration. “[…] Story is for a human as water is for a fish – all-encompassing and not quite palpable.” (Gottschall, 2012, xiv) Each personal narrative is inevitably tied up with all the others that came across it, whether these belong to the real world or the imaginative one. As a matter of fact, the story of each person is a literary story: human beings read the world, and through that they perceive selected pieces of information from reality and eventually reassemble them together into a tale that makes sense for them. Therefore, humans are inscribed into a continuum of literature, a never-ending stream of narrative that will adjust to its present background with the unravelling of time. Thus, if literature is a-temporal, its story turns into a story of continuous adaptations and appropriations of prior literary works, creating a labyrinth of connections between them that runs through the centuries. In literary theory, the concept of intertextuality describes exactly the links a text establishes with other texts, thus considering it not as a closed, self-sufficient system but rather as co-dependent from the external structure of prior literary tradition. (Kristeva in Still and Worton, 1990, 1) Genette instead uses the term “transtextuality” (1997, 1) to refer to “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts.” (Genette, 1997, 1)

This thesis aims to analyse the complex question of authorship in adaptations in an “unconventional” medium, the graphic novel, considering Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and his reworking of Shakespeare’s plays in order to show the difficult and not-at-all straightforward relationship between an author, his readership and his work.

The first chapter serves as a theoretical introduction to the writers. After a brief summary of Gaiman’s personal and professional life, also describing his writing, the second paragraph analyses briefly adaptations from a theoretical point of view, moving to the way in which Shakespearean adaptations have modified his public perception, and concluding with an analysis of adaptations specifically addressed to a young adult audience. The last part focuses on the graphic novel, introducing this fairly recently developed means of communication with a description of its main characteristics. It then proceeds to a description of the history of the rise of the graphic novel, underlying its importance as an in-between land, where words and images interlace, as the former always interferes with the latter and vice versa.

The second section revolves around The Sandman presenting the story of Dream (also known as Morpheus, Oneiros, or under other names), king of the realm of Dreaming, as it occurs through the 75 issues of the graphic novel. Furthermore, it analyses the family of the Endless, composed of seven different identities which are personified representations of some intrinsic human characteristics: Dream, Death, Desire, Destiny, Delirium (formerly Delight), Despair and Destruction. Gaiman recreates a mythological pantheon of beings even more powerful than gods, and gives each one of them a specific function, depth and personality. The chapter investigates Gaiman’s view of mythology and gods as subject to decline, oblivion and eventually death. It then presents a comparison of A Midsummer Night’s

Dream, issue 19, and The Tempest, issue 75, both in their original

Shakespearean form and as they appear in Gaiman’s adaptation.

“If Sandman was about one thing, it was about the act of storytelling, and the, possibly, redemptive nature of stories. But then, it’s hard for a two-thousand-page story to be about just one thing.” When Gaiman (2016, 58) describes his own first DC graphic novel, he focuses on the power of stories and their reception. As aforementioned, literature is a web human beings are inevitably tangled up in. Thus, the third chapter considers the problems of being a writer, a creator of actual literature, as Gaiman addresses them in The

Sandman. It opens with an analysis on postmodernism and the postmodernist

tools Gaiman uses inside his graphic novel: the deconstruction of mythology; his conception of storytelling, explored through metafiction; and his literary worldbuilding. The second paragraph examines both Dream and Shakespeare’s characters, as the author removes from the Shakespearean myth all the superstructures imposed by critics over the centuries in order to bring the Bard back to a human level of empathy and understanding. This last part is devoted to the question of authorship and the relationship between a writer and his characters. Gaiman more than once declared: “I tend to write about things from wherever I am standing, and that means I include too much me in the things I write.” (2016, xvii) It is evident in the graphic novel: Dream is nonetheless a literary parallel to Gaiman, as much as Shakespeare represents a human parallel to Dream. The literary copies of the author discover “through [their] life and the course of the series the necessary loss tied to a life [spent] bringing dreams to life.” (Castaldo, 2004, 99) Eventually, at the end of the series, all three are set free from the burden of words: Shakespeare completes his last play and will write no more, Dream dies to be reborn as a new self and Gaiman takes his leave from the world of

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HAPTER I: THE MEN (AND THE TOOLS)

1.1. Gaiman’s biography

Neil Gaiman easily slips away from one single definition, as he cannot only be described as a novelist. As a matter of fact, he can be called an all-around writer: throughout his life, he has been a journalist, a rock ’n’ roll music critic, a book reviewer, a poet, a television script adapter. He wrote short stories as well as novels and, of course, graphic novels. This tremendous variety of genres gives a grasp of a tireless mind constantly looking for new ways of telling a story and that can hardly be labelled under a unique tag.

He was born in Portchester, England, on 10th _{November 1960, above his}

father’s tiny grocery store. His mother introduced him to reading since he was very young, and by the age of three he already knew how to read. He became a voracious reader and tackled every kind of book. Gaiman, a self-described “feral child who was raised in libraries” (Gaiman, 2015), spent most of his days as a child in the local library, devouring books with no discrimination. However, he particularly favoured stories of magic and fantasy by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ursula K. LeGuin, G. K. Chesterton, H. P. Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. In the summer of 1967, a friend of his father brought him a cardboard box full of comics, Gaiman fell in love with the genre and at eleven years old decided he wanted to write comic books for a living. These comics came from America and young Neil was strikingly impressed by the way they presented the country: “these comics presented America and the legends of the Norse gods in a similar way – heroic figures completing monumental challenges in a vast and

seemingly magical landscape.” (Olson, 2005, 12) But when he met the professional counsellor who was supposed to direct him towards his dream job and eventually told him he wanted to become a comic writer, the counsellor thoughtlessly dismissed him and suggested considering a career in accountancy. Gaiman, deeply hurt, put aside his dream for nine solid years, however he did not give it up entirely and eventually found his way to make it into his work.

He began his writing career in the 80s as a journalist for some British newspapers (such as The Observer and The Sunday Times of London Magazine) with the sole intention of getting better in writing and knowing the world around him. Eventually his goal was to become a writer of fiction, novels and comics and films, but he had to get thick skinned first. He “learned to write by writing” (Gaiman, 2016, 489): it did not matter what he was talking about, as long as this would get him a bit closer to his dream.

In 1984 comics came back into his life: while he was waiting at Victoria Station, in London, he noticed a newsstand with piles of comics, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing 25 (a graphic novel about a monster half human and half plant) stood out; Gaiman started flicking through it and the old flame for graphic novels burnt again. He started a correspondence with Moore (V for

Vendetta, Watchmen) and they immediately became friends: as if he was his

pupil, Alan taught Gaiman how to write a comic script.

Furthermore, from an unfortunate incident with a publishing house gone broke, Neil met Dave McKean, a young and talented cartoonist. The two clicked instantly and started not only a personal but also professional relationship, as they began working together. Their first work was a graphic novel called Violent Cases, published by Escape Books, which immediately brought them to DC comics’ attention. In 1986, some talent-hunters from DC attended the annual U.K. Comics Convention in order to court some British writers and artists and get them involved with American projects. Gaiman and McKean suggested reviving one of the forgotten DC characters, Black

Orchid, and create a new comic around it and the publishing house accepted. The graphic novel progressed well enough to the point that DC asked the duo to work with them again and do something else once the comic was published.Gaiman put on the table the idea of bringing back The Sandman, a crime character from the 70s, but what appealed him was the idea of someone able to walk and operate in the land of Dreaming: he got rid of the original series and reworked the whole story instead. The British artist created a completely different graphic novel, way more mature than the comics people were used to, with an in-depth psychological cut on both characters and stories. The Sandman was firstly published in 1988 and it promptly reached the first positions of book charts: an immediate success which continued through the years, as the series became one of DC’s top selling titles, eclipsing even Batman and Superman. (Hoal, 2013) The graphic novel will be later discussed in length in Chapter II of this dissertation.

The Sandman opened up a fortunate season of writing for Gaiman. As

aforementioned, he did not constrain himself into one genre, and while working at the comic, he paired up with one of the best loved British writers, Terry Pratchett (Discworld series), to write his first novel, Good Omens: The

Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990), a completely

over-the-top adventure of a demon and an archangel trying to prevent Armageddon from happening. To Good Omens followed Neverwhere (1995),

Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005), The Graveyard Book (2008), The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) and Norse Mythology (2017).

However, there is a fil rouge that connects all of his works, from prose fiction to graphic novels: Gaiman’s narrative always refers to another world that collides and overlaps with ours, to a hidden path that takes the protagonist to something other than ordinary, to a different level of perception of reality.

This subtle otherness is usually very close to the present reality and difficult to recognise sometimes it can present itself to the protagonist as a door to cross, or as a road to follow, or as an entity that does not entirely bend to the rules of planet Earth. In Freudian terms, this element can relate to the sphere of the unheimlich, translated in English as the uncanny, and it refers to something close to the familiar and ordinary but somehow detached from it, unsettling, scary, disturbing. (Freud, 1919, 234-257) His writing is always filled with a hidden sense, a long-lost echo or shadow that gleams over the surface of troubled waters and that is because most of Gaiman’s oeuvre belongs to the literary genre of fantasy. It is difficult to provide a precise definition of this genre, as many literary works that fall under this umbrella term of fantasy differ in forms and characteristics. However, Jackson states that fantasy “has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and different.” (2005, 8) Generally considered as “popular” and “lowbrow”, hence confined to mere escapism, fantasy literature actually provides an alternative way to deal with complicated issues, deeply rooted into the historical context a specific fantasy work belonged to (for instance, the First and Second World War and their consequences for writers such as Lewis and Tolkien, or the death of God in Pullman’s series His Dark Materials). Fantasy literature requires the suspension of disbelief and faith in the new reality created by the author. The genre exploded halfway through the nineteenth century because of the massive changes the world was undergoing at the time (as the industrial revolution and the new Darwinian theories on the evolution of species), and it became central to children’s literature. Children’s fantasy can usually be divided into two streams. The first begins in the Victorian era and includes works such as Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Kingsley’s The Water-babies and Nesbit’s Five Children and It. It usually had didactic and moralistic goals (even though Carroll’s Alice is an exception), as these stories were intended

to admonish their young audience and direct it towards a more proper behaviour. (Tosi, Paruolo, 2011, 175 – 205) Just between the First and Second World Wars, fantasy has found a renewed popularity amongst readers that still keeps its audience flipping through its pages. Tolkien and Lewis were the initiators of this second wave and their masterpieces, The Lord of the Rings for the former and The Chronicles of Narnia for the latter, were established as exemplary models by the next generation of fantasy writers, who tried either to imitate them or to move away from them. Tolkien and Lewis’s greatest achievement was to “normalise the idea of secondary world[s]” (James, 2012, 65), of these alternative, fantastic creations that stand beside our ordinary world. Tolkien in particular gave a precise definition of the term, stating that

the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (1964, 36-7)

Furthermore, both writers integrated in their imaginary worlds their passion for the Middle Ages (which they both studied) and the idea of chivalric quest, where the protagonist(s) embarks in a long journey that will lead her or him to ultimately save the Secondary World (usually portrayed as subject to decay) from evil forces and to personal growth.

Gaiman inherits this fantasy tradition and in his works usually borrows the dreamlike and symbolic dimension from Victorian fantasy, leaving behind its moralistic and pedagogic intentions; from this latest revival he adopts not only the element of the heroic quest (in works such as Stardust and

Neverwhere) but also, and especially, the building of coherent and strong

secondary worlds. This is particularly true in The Sandman, where Gaiman constructs a multiverse where mythology, folklore, legends, magic and

ordinary life intersect and interact. This multiverse has specific super-structural rules which govern life inside it, and even mythological characters, who are usually considered almighty and not subject to any kind of control, have to abide by those laws. Gaiman’s supernatural characters, though, are far from static: they tend to disobey those rules and leave their allocated places. For instance, at some point in the graphic novel Lucifer, bored with his existence, decides to leave his place as Lord of Hell, expels all the demons and damned souls from the pit and hands over the keys of an empty Hell to Dream of the Endless, Sandman’s protagonist, who is left to fix the situation. The writer is not afraid of playing, getting into competition with, adopting and adapting other writers: as a matter of fact, he is actually very good at taking someone else’s voice and make it his own. An exemplary model can be found in the version of Shakespeare he portrayed in The Sandman.

1.2. Adapting Shakespeare for a Young Adult audience

1.2.1. What is Adaptation and why we adapt

To define the term “adaptation” is no easy task. The word per se already entails two different ways of thinking about it: adaptation is both a process and a product. (Hutcheon, 2013, 15) First and foremost, though, an adaptation presents itself for what it is: the altering of an original text into something new. It openly declares its nature. Borrowing Gérard Genette’s terminology, adaptations are inherently “palimspestuous” (Genette, 1997, ix) works, which means they are inevitably linked to other previous texts, part of the literary canon: “any writing is rewriting.” (Prince in Genette, 1997, ix). Adaptations always imply an original work to begin with, a prior text they inevitably refer to. This unavoidable subordination does not nonetheless suggest an inferiority of the adaptation. When it comes to it, in the mind of the public, the term usually takes on a negative connotation: the “hypertext” (Genette, 1997, 5) (which is the adaptation) is considered less important, already second-rate, mediocre compared to the “hypotext” (Genette, 1997, 5) (the original text). The brand-new hypertext starts with great disadvantage to the hypotext, because it is thought of not as a creative act, but as an imitation, a mere reproduction. It is considered a degradation of the original text, in the sense that an adaptation is always “less literature” compared to the prior work and somehow ruins it. However, according to Hutcheon:

An adaptation is not vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from the its source and leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep the prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would never have had otherwise. (2013, 176)

Thus, even though Western culture has inherited the (post-) Romantic revaluation of the original creation above all forms of borrowings, adaptation

has still a great appeal in our time. Hutcheon describes adaptation in three different ways:

• adaptation as a “formal entity or product” (Hutcheon, 2013, 7) or “an acknowledged transposition of a recognisable other work or works” (Hutcheon, 2013, 8);

• as a “process of creation” (Hutcheon, 2013, 8) or “a creative and an interpretative act of appropriation” (Hutcheon, 2013, 8);

• as a “process of reception” (Hutcheon, 2013, 8) or “an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (Hutcheon, 2013, 8).

The first view, adaptation as a product, involves usually a transportation to another mode: this always means change and consequently gains and losses in the new format. Adaptations are “re-mediations, that is, specifically translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images).” (Hutcheon, 2013, 16) According to the second definition, adaptation is also a process of creation, and this entails an act of appropriation, which means taking possession of another’s story and interpreting it according to one’s own perspective, making the adapted material one’s own. Hence, adaptation becomes a double process of interpreting and then creating something new. It should be noted that Hutcheon and Sanders diverge on the definition of adaptation and appropriation, as the latter applies a different distinction between them. Adaptation, in her opinion, overtly informs the reader about the relationship the hypertext has with the hypotext either through its title or though other references. (Sanders, 2016, 35) On the other hand, appropriation requires a transformation of the hypotext into a completely different product, for example through a change of genre or medium (here intended as means of communication). (Sanders, 2016, 35)

Finally, adaptation as a process of reception implies an intertextual dimension of the text: because of its own nature, it blatantly refers to other easily recognisable works. However, in order for it to produce a response in the audience, be it of satisfaction or annoyance, it must appeal to the memory of the public. In order to experience difference as well as similarity, an audience has to be able to recognize the hypotext and eventually enjoy (or not) the hypertext. According to Sanders, adaptation depends “on the literary canon for the provision of a shared repository of storylines, themes, characters and ideas upon which their creative variations can be made.” (2016, 57) The mnemonic element is tied up with repetition: the public is accustomed to finding comfort in the monotonous rhythm of lullabies and nursery rhymes told and retold since childhood. Nonetheless, as aforementioned, adaptation involves also a certain, though variable, degree of change, which depends upon the cultural, historical, economic and social context the hypertext belongs to. Hence, adaptation is repetition without replication:

[it] is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places. […] We retell – and show again and interact anew with – stories over and over; in the process, they change with each repetition, and yet they are recognisably the same. What they are not is necessarily inferior or second-rate – or they would not have survived. Temporal precedence does not mean anything more than temporal priority. (Hutcheon, 2013, 176-7)

1.2.2. “What’s in a name?” (Shakespeare, 2000, 2.I.86): a brief history of Shakespeare’s fame through adaptations

Shakespeare crystallised in Western civilisation as the highest form of Culture, a “cultural deity” (Levine, 1988, 53), as Lawrence Levine stated. The process of elevating the Bard to a transcendental figure which represents the

icon of good taste, cultural refinement and intellectual ability of our culture began immediately after his death, with the publication of the First Folio. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell collected all his plays into a single book, transforming a performative act (that of the play) into a literary, printed one. As an introduction to the Folio, Ben Jonson wrote a poem to honour his dead friend and addressed him as “he who was not of an age, but for all time…” (1623, lxii, v. 43), framing him as an international timeless classic. Shakespeare incorporates the idea of the Author, both a natural talent who effortlessly dedicates his life to the creative act and, at the same time, an erudite poet who thoroughly polishes his language. However, the Shakespeare the public gets to know nowadays is not the mirror of the true, ancient Bard, but an idealisation of how he was considered during the centuries, an alteration of the original version. Shakespeare himself was an adapter, so his narratives were already pieces of different tales sewed together and moulded to his will. Fischlin and Fortier state that “as long as there have been plays by Shakespeare, there have been adaptations of those plays.” (2000, 1) Though he was definitely popular amongst his contemporaries, during the Restoration his texts demanded a revision in order to be staged again when Charles II lifted the nearly twenty-year ban over London theatres in 1660. Shakespearean texts were made more apt to suit contemporary tastes and political concerns and modernised to cut out what was perceived as archaic, and plots were recast to serve royalist perspectives. An example is Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear (1680), who eliminated the role of the Fool, added a love story between Edgar and Cornelia and gave the play a happy ending, closing it with the glorious restoration of Lear’s dynasty instead of Cornelia’s and his death.

The eighteenth century saw Shakespeare’s popularity growing exponentially, particularly because he clashed with the neo-classical principles dominant at the time. Refusing to subdue to the Aristotelian rules of unity of time, place and action, Shakespearean works created an alternative to the French

paradigm of theatre. The everlasting conflict (both cultural and political) between France and the United Kingdom reinforced the idea of Shakespeare as an outsider, a writer who stood alone and refused to bend to the rules and therefore regarded as specifically British, the genius of a newly empowered middle class and of British national culture. According to Lanier, “[…] Shakespeare’s ‘irregularity’ [began] to take on an anti-aristocratic, quasi-democratic cast. Neoclassicism was closely linked to inherited authority, both to the ‘ancients’ and to the ancient régime, and Shakespeare seemed to reject both.” (2002, 31) Hence, he acquired the status he would hold throughout the following centuries: he came to represent the British theatre and Englishness. The eighteenth century was also marked out by the promotion of this newly bourgeois British Shakespeare thanks to the efforts of David Garrick, the actor and producer of the Drury Lane Theatre from 1749 till 1776. He established the role of the actor-manager: more and more theatrical companies started to revolve around an actor or a group of actors who took on the task of managing the troupe and performing lead roles in Shakespearean plays, specifically adapted to highlight the acting of such roles.

With the following century came the Romantic period and the Victorian era, which witnessed a peak in Shakespeare’s mass appeal as well as crucial shifts in Shakespeare’s cultural status. Following Kant’s definition of genius as “the talent that gives the rule to the art, […] the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to the art” (1987, 174), the Romantics identified Shakespeare as such genius and constructed the concept of Bardolatry, forging the idea of the poet without formal education who wrote from natural intuition.

Victorians picked up on that idea, bringing Shakespeare to the top of his popularity, in England as much as in the rest of Europe and in the United States. The Victorian age was indeed a prolific playground for all kind of adaptations, as Victorians used the literary canon in order to “plunder

characters, plotlines and generic conventions, as well as narrative idiom and style.” (Sanders, 2016, 152) Shakespeare was particularly appreciated and remodelled to become “a focus of disciplinary forces concerned with controlling and transforming traditional popular recreations regarded as potential threats to social order.” (Lanier, 2002, 36) His characters underwent the process of “novelisation”, which changed their public reception. They were no longer perceived just as literary devices but also as three-dimensional personas, with biographical histories and psychological insights which deepened their experience and made the audience empathise with them. Examples of this tendency are rewritings such as Browning’s poem

Caliban upon Setebos and Renan’s closet drama Caliban: Suite de “La Tempête”.

(Lanier, 2002, 35) These narratives brought Shakespeare

in line with Victorian domestic mores, particularly those linked to the behaviour of women. […] Paternal authority [was] placed beyond question […]. Women, by contrast, [became] virtuous by submitting to their fathers or husbands […]. Shakespeare’s women [were] presented as models of marital duty who, by submitting to their husbands, [could] become public figures, exercising authority in the community through their moral examples. (Lanier, 2002, 35-6)

The processes in place during that period determined de facto the elevation of Shakespeare to an instrument of cultural assimilation: he came to be regarded as an English “classic”, formally integrated in the academic curriculum and therefore central to the formation of English as a discipline. The publication of the Globe edition, the first Shakespeare edition entirely curated by university scholars, was the last step to completely incorporate him in the higher education programme, as the two greatest British universities institutionalised him as central in their English curriculum, Cambridge in 1878 and Oxford in in 1884. The institutionalisation of Shakespeare was also a response to the fast-paced whirlwind of modernity.

To fix the Bard as the pole star inside the British canon meant to hold still some of the cultural values in an ever-changing world. With the advent of the industrial revolution and the new world asset in constant speed came the fear of culture slipping away from the frame the tradition enclosed it in. Thus culture, and Shakespeare as its stronghold, took on itself the role of holding together the traditional values against the non-stopping change of the modern era.

This became even more obvious at the beginning of the twentieth century. The rise of capitalism reinforced the distinction between upper and lower classes, positioning the malleable middle class against the mob of workers. This divide brought to the surface the need for a new method of communication, something that levelled that distinction and that was immediately available to everyone, aside from class discrimination. Mass culture and mass media perfectly embodied that need, providing new ways of getting in touch with that subject usually precluded to the lower class, even though it clashed with the Culture commonly conveyed by the universities. However, mass culture and mass media also posed many issues: the celerity of mass reproduction amplified the scale of the audience art works were made for, instantly turning the term “popular culture” into “mass entertainment”, and therefore subjected to commercial interests. Art was starting to be considered a consumer commodity, losing the “aura” that, according to Walter Benjamin (1935, 232), was essential to make an art-piece unique. Such concerns, instead of narrowing the rift between high culture and commercial pop culture, deepened that gap. Amongst all this, Shakespeare “presented both sides of the cultural divide” (Lanier, 2002, 41), serving at the same time as the “centre of the newly professionalised discipline of English” (Lanier, 2002, 41) and as “a writer with a long-standing reputation for being ‘popular’.” (Lanier, 2002, 41) Nevertheless, the Bard constituted a hallmark for popular culture: as Lanier stated, he “has become a reliable source of ready-made cultural prestige, a way of lifting up virtually

any pop product out of its trivial status.” (2002, 43) Adaptations of Shakespearean dramas were used in the early days of cinema production in order to promote it and make it known to a wider audience. After the consolidation of the Hollywood system in the 1930s, Shakespeare was progressively abandoned. Cinema definitely established its power over theatre, because the former approached all kinds of spectators regardless of any classist conception, whereas the latter still preserved that elitist allure typical of something tied up with the academia. (Lanier, 2002, 45)

The last two decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed a revival of Shakespeare’s fame, with an outstanding explosion of Shakespearean adaptations. Authors seemed to re-appropriate the Bard both as a tool for financial profit (kicking off the Bardbiz, Shakespeare’s industry) and as a way to elevate the final art product: Miller’s on point argumentation (2003, 1-8) reveals that behind Shakespeare’s name resides the validation of the literary status quo of a work of art, and, at the same time, the rejection of traditional, post-Romantic values typical of Western culture. New media opened the door for new possibilities of adaptation and therefore nowadays, it could be argued, there is no more just one Shakespeare, but tons of “Shakespeares”, as many as there are adaptations of his plays. (Hulbert, Wetmore and York, 2016, 1) Movies like Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer

Night’s Dream (1999) are all part of this trend, treading between homage and

parody. Moreover, Disney’s The Lion King (1994) and The Little Mermaid (1989) are rewritings of respectively Hamlet and The Tempest (Finkelstein, 1999, 179-196), not to mention references to various Shakespearean plays in the Harry Potter series (Hermione’s name from The Winter’s Tale’s character, just to make an obvious example). All of these films and novels target specifically one peculiar part of the social fabric: teenagers.

1.2.3. Shakespeare for the Young

Of all new audiences for Shakespeare, children and young adults are at once the most open and enthusiastic as well as potentially the most likely to be misdirected or even disappointed by their initial encounters with the Bard. (Miller, 2003, 2)

Delivering Shakespeare to the youngest section of his audience is a task to be handled with care. In the anglophone world, the Bard is usually first approached by British youths in secondary education classrooms, where teachers right away face the most problematic issues with Shakespearean works: boredom and inaccessibility. A young audience have no interest in Shakespeare, as he is perceived as distant from their reality and his plays are believed to have no relevance to their lives. And even though someone might find him interesting, other problems rise preventing any close contact with the poet: language, and a distant culture, for example. Boredom and inaccessibility are inevitably intertwined: “inaccessibility usually leads to boredom.” (Hulbert, Wetmore and York, 2006, 2) Therefore, most of the education industry is devoted to make Shakespeare cooler, more accessible and more appealing to young adults. Three different ways of dealing with the anxiety of relevance are translations (or changing of linguistic code), reduction (or stripping a play to its essential elements), and reference (or quoting the text, the characters, the plot or Shakespeare himself directly or indirectly, either with or without explanation). (Hulbert, Wetmore, York and Wetmore, 2006, 1 – 4) These three “coping mechanisms” are not mutually exclusive, they can and often do overlap. However, youngsters are not passive recipients of these adaptations, instead they have agency and power over them. As a matter of fact, these specific kinds of Shakespearean adaptations are precisely made to make them enjoy the Bard, to make him look closer to their world, and therefore the industry has to look after the needs and requests of youth culture.

Youth culture came into being around the 1950s in the United States and further developed in following decade, becoming a counterculture: a rejection of tradition and parental authority was its most specific feature, alongside with rock-and-roll music, juvenile delinquency, experimentation with narcotics and a growing sense of political empowerment. Furthermore, youth culture was and still is a “fundamentally mediated culture, one that continues to represent itself in terms of the products it buys, the art that defines it and the art it defines as its own” (Lewis, 2014, 4), establishing a “dialectic of cultural autonomy and media appropriation.” (Lewis, 2014, 4) Thus, the identity of this new culture is constructed and revolves around a fundamental paradox: it is a media-made culture and, at the same time, it is a culture that makes media. Youths are inherently consumptive: they consume what comes from the media while simultaneously dictating what the media have to produce. Therefore, another crucial characteristic intrinsic to this ever-consuming hunger is that juvenile culture appropriates whatever comes to its way, as teenagers generally don’t work, have no responsibilities, but have money, time and interests and thus they can ingest whatever they please, bending it to meet their needs.

“Shakespop” (Lanier, 2002, 17), then, is a product of that collective consuming. It is part of a cultural and unavoidably economic exchange: youth culture, “such as rock or hip-hop music, graphic novels or teen films, gives Shakespeare ‘street cred’, whereas Shakespeare gives youth ‘cultural cred’.” (Hulbert, Wetmore and York, 2006, 8) The Bard hence provides that credibility youth culture lacks by definition, giving inherent confidence to that group and at the same time granting it some trustworthiness to the eye of the most conservatives. However, conveying Shakespeare through youth culture to a young audience also means that the different Shakespeares conveyed are ranked by that audience, creating a separation between what is

considered “in” and what “out”. The young adult audience creates inner groups, distinguishing between the cool Shakespeare and the unpopular one. The identity of that young public is not just one, but becomes a multiplicity. Depending on which youth group Shakespeare is being promoted to, that group takes on a different identity. At the same time, that same group consists of different individuals who at their turn shape it from the inside. Another factor to be taken account of is the different type of media used to mediate the Bard. Accordingly, this distinction of media projects once more a distinction of the receiving audience, thus “a multiplicity of Shakespeare is met by a multiplicity of audiences with a multiplicity of contexts and frames for understanding.” (Hulbert, Wetmore and York, 2006, 9)

Youth culture Shakespearean adaptations involve every media, from video games to comic books, from novels to music, not without any criticism. As a matter of fact, cultural and political conservatives declared Shakespop a corruption, a vulgarity, something that sullied the true spirit of Shakespeare, while they also complained about the Bard dissolving from universities and from popular knowledge, replaced by other forms of literary “culture”, such as Toni Morrison, rap music and multicultural literature. However, ironically enough, most Shakespop is culturally conservative. Films such as Dead Poets

Society or 10 Things I Hate About You use controversial, unconventional

educational figures who adopt Shakespeare as a way to help marginalised young people to sort out their own life. Thus, this kind of movies upheld the Bard to his place at the height of culture, using him as a compass to the correct and rightful upbringing of misguided youths. Shakespop confirms Shakespeare’s canonicity, value and “appropriate place at the top of the curriculum and the culture.” (Hulbert, Wetmore and York, 2006, 12)

Shakespop inevitably intertwines with one of the newest forms of literature expressly directed to teens that has taken place in the last years: Young Adult (YA) narrative. This literary genre touches topical themes dear to a juvenile

audience usually in a direct, not sugar-coated way such as adolescence as a transition towards adulthood, the lure of transgression and extreme adventures, the search for an identity of one’s own, the first sexual experiences, the obstacles in the relationship with family and friends. (Tosi, 2014, 79) YA novels fit perfectly in that place between entertainment and education, as they usually represent a transposition of classic texts. They are highly recommended not only as individual readings but also as classroom discussion material, given the close interpolation occurring between themes treated inside those books and teen lives. Authors of YA novels usually adopt a first-person narration to get an insight on the Shakespearean characters’ mind and give them space to justify their actions and behaviours. YA novels most of the times share some features with fan fictions, a “democratic genre” (Pugh, 2005, 47) where authors, usually fans of a specific text, author or film rewrite and rework them to a new design. These authors can create alternative versions of those narrative universes, adding details to the plot or deepening the description of a character, changing some events or completely modifying the plot. Fan fictions invent new stories and different fictional worlds as much as YA narrations: picking up on narrative gaps or placing themselves in unexplored spaces of the canon, both genres are free to experiment. They show to the reading audience the “what ifs” of a story and the consequences of those supposed alternatives, describing other new things still fitting in the same original narrative context.

The questions that must be addressed are many: why Shakespeare? Why and how do we make him accessible and comprehensible to children and young adults? As aforementioned in the previous chapter, Shakespeare came to embody the humanist values crucial to Western culture. This concept, though, brings with it another issue: it is culture itself that decides which values should be upheld by contemporary society, choosing qualities that should be passed on from generation to generation in order for them to

maintain the same prestige. Hence, reality is never objective, but always constructed, mediated. Another problem derives from this assertion : original children and young adult literature as much as adaptations and appropriations (whether Shakespearean or not) are all written by adults for that juvenile audience, in a situation where the former declares to be superior to the latter as in possession of the “cultural capital”. (Hateley, 2009, 1) Bourdieu coined the term in 1973 and defined it as the accumulation of knowledge, behaviours and skills that a person can tap into to demonstrate one’s cultural competence and social status. What children receive is thus a mediated literature, “a ‘space’ for children produced and supervised by adults” (Hateley, 2009, 12) where “learned/inculcated dispositions and ‘tastes’ are rendered natural and normative within a framework of cultural capital, and are linked inextricably by a classified vision of society.” (Hateley, 2009, 12) Reading Shakespeare becomes then a signifier of the cultured and educated, a mark of a highly refined instruction and upbringing.

Furthermore, adults have a twofold conception of children and teens: a young audience is both composed of present youngsters, and of future adults that will one day be part of society. The task of grown individuals then is to convey through literature those values considered essential for a society to function. According to Hateley,

[w]hen Shakespeare is interpolated into children’s literature, the ‘value’ of literacy and cultural capital is performed in the present but also projects a future ‘high-literacy’ and establishes the goal not just of future reading, but the future reading of Shakespeare. Thus present-adults produce and circulate qualities they consider inherently valuable, in order to create future-adults who share such views. (Hateley, 2009, 13)

It is thus a political act to adopt and adapt Shakespeare, his works are used as tools of a social education motivated towards regulating the reader’s mind, who subconsciously acquires a specific attitude toward power (political, social and personal), hierarchy, gender, class, and race. YA authors, for instance, take on the task to help teens dealing with problems of their age as a phase of rebellion, however this disobedience is never real, it is always inscribed inside an evolutionary path already traced by society. Therefore, authors become guides of an intended, only-falsely-casual layout aimed at shaping already determined grown-ups. Hateley furtherly argues that

intertextual appropriations of Shakespeare for children serve to discursively reflect and produce normative behaviours with specific reference to cultural and literary value, inculcating a sense of cultural capital, while also inscribing [specific] […] positions in relation to such capital generally and Shakespeare specifically. (Hateley, 2009, 15)

In her analysis, though, Hateley does not recognise any agency to young readers, reducing them to passive spectators of a foretold destiny, with no power to react.

1.3. A dance between the visible and the invisible: the graphic

novel as an in-between land

1.3.1. Definition and introduction to the medium

McCloud defines comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (1993, 9). Tabachnick uses McCloud’s interpretation to delineate the graphic novel, stating that it is an “extended comic book freed of commercial constrictions, written by adults and for adults, and able to tackle complex and sophisticated issues.” (2017, 1) As a matter of fact, the graphic novel is one of the newest media today (or, to be correct, one of the newest to be rediscovered today, as will be analysed in the next paragraph), and because of that it suffers from the newcomer’s syndrome: just a few critics consider it as serious enough to deal with major issues as narrative prose, poetry and the theatre have done for centuries. However, through the years the graphic novel has evolved and proved itself a respectable literary and artistic medium to convey important messages. It came to include different genres, both fiction and non-fiction, as memoirs, biographies, heroic fantasy series, detective stories, adaptations of literary texts including the classics, and more. Nowadays, the rise of the graphic novel is due to three different reasons. First and foremost, the very nature of reading is changing, and the graphic novel demands “a hybrid kind of reading which involves viewing as well as reading per se.” (Tabachnick, 2017, 2) The second reason springs from the first, as the immediacy of the experience requires a combination of words and visual images which the graphic novel by its nature provides as opposed to other visual media. And third, the array of genres the graphic novel now includes varies a lot and most of these works are not available in any other media. (Tabachnick, 2017, 2 – 3)

As aforementioned, the graphic novel is a collaborative medium that relies on the interaction of different kinds of symbols (usually, pictures and words combined) or by a sequence of images in relation to one another to create meaning. It also requires an active reading audience, who can add additional information to the work. Graphic novels are at the same time reductive and additive, as “the creator reduces the ideas that the creator wants to communicate into a finite set of symbols and the reader adds in additional information in the process of decoding the presentation”. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 8) Usually they are the outcome of close teamwork: a group of collaborators splits the tasks of writing the script, line artwork, colouring, and so on. Graphic novels follow a precise structure constituted of four different key elements that are essential and almost ever-present in the medium: the panel, the sequence, the page and the narrative. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 10)

The panel is defined as a section on the page that captures a fundamental moment or scene and lays the foundations of a graphic novel. It is the creator who decides which key moment(s) to enclose into a panel. This component can incorporate a longer period than a single static frame, as, for instance, two characters can have an entire dialogue in the same panel with a single still image. Abel and Madden determine another four fundamental elements that compose the panel: framing, blocking, acting and mise-en-scène. (in Duncan and Smith, 2017, 10) A frame is the border that defines the panel. It is usually rectangular but it can vary, and that variation produces a change in the reception of the scene: a rectangular frame is used to outline a common setting, and, when the illustrations are in a sequence, they can communicate the progression of the story; a thick or jagged border can indicate an unusual situation, a decisive moment for example; a scalloped line might suggest a flashback or a memory retrieved by a character; and so forth. Another important factor is the size of the frame, which can occupy either a section or

a full page, altering the emphasis creators want to give to that specific panel. Also, creators can decide the focus they want to put on the objects inside the frame changing the point of view, so the reader can find medium panels (characters are portrayed from the waist up), close-up panels (focus on a specific element) and establishing panels (long shots usually used to define the setting of a new scene). (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 11 – 13) The second key component is the placement of characters within a panel, which is called blocking. It usually underlines the relationship between objects inside a panel, as creators consciously choose who and how to portray within a frame. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 13) The third factor to take into consideration when constructing a panel is acting, or how characters’ emotions, body posture, and gestures are displayed and the way they are perceived by the reader. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 14) And to conclude, the last element of a panel is the mise-en-scène, or what elements creators decide to present to the reader. It includes characters, backgrounds, dialogues and sound effects appearing within the frame and it can vary from panel to panel. Words are the most essential element of this feature: they can be present (usually, but not only) as dialogues, thoughts, sound effects and captions. Dialogues and sound effects belong to the level of the story, they take place within it and therefore are called diegetic sounds. Other words placed in captions are called non-diegetic sounds, as they happen outside the story per se. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 15 – 17) McCloud describes seven different relationships between words and images, the most common being the interdependent relationship. (1993, 153 – 155) These combinations can be:

• Word specific: pictures illustrates but do not add meaning to the overall text;

• Picture specific: words are just “soundtrack to a visually told sequence” (McCloud, 1993, 153)

• Duo-specific: words and pictures are both essential and convey the same message;

• Additive: words expand the message sent by the picture;

• Parallel: words and image seem to follow different, non-intersecting courses;

• Montage: words are part of the bigger picture;

• Interdependent: “words and pictures go hand by hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone.” (McCloud, 1993, 155)

After the panel, the next structural feature of a graphic novel is the sequence, which is composed of juxtaposed panels, placed in relationship to one another. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 17) The creators have the ability to select which elements of the story to portray in order to build a coherent narrative. Usually, two juxtaposed panels create a space between them called gutter. It may appear as a white, normal space left by two adjacent panels, or as a thin black line when there is no space at all, or again not appear at all when one panel overlaps with the next or blends with it. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 18) The gutter allows the readers to perform a process called “closure” (McCloud, 1993, 63), where they infer information implied by the author, not expressly depicted. It is the place where the reader becomes an active agent, adding pieces to and filling up the gaps of the story Each gutter provides a transition, because panels tend to skip moments in the storytelling. There are three most common types of transition: action-to-action (when a single subject progresses), subject-to-subject (when it stays in the same scene but changes its subject) and scene-to-scene (when it involves moving through time and space). When panels and gutters occur in a sequence, they create coherent storytelling. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 19 – 20)

The third element to consider is the page. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 20) Creators have to be aware of the actual layout of the graphic novel to arrange panels in strips or tiers, so that the comic book can work best for the reader.

Usually, in the West, people read a page in a Z-pattern, starting at the top left of the page, proceeding left to right, then down and left to the next level, and so on. In an ordinary graphic novel, creators tend to put one panel after the other in a continuous ribbon, but sometimes they can vary to keep the reader’s attention. Splash pages (an entire page for a single panel) serve for a dramatic effect to the story, maybe for a surprising introduction or to add suspense. Creators can place smaller panels inside a larger panel, to strengthen the relationship between them. Another way to vary the usual order of reading is for creators to take advantage of the layout of printed books and use the space of two pages printed side-by-side, creating a double-page spread. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 20 – 22)

To conclude, the final element composing a graphic novel is the narrative. In a graphic novel, the story tends to be complex and develops for many pages. Successful narratives manage to convey major themes and ideas through the story, balancing convention with invention. Five different components create effective storytelling: a protagonist, the main character inside a story, who has to overcome challenges and with whom the reader can empathise; a spark, the kick-off of the narrative progression, an event that changes the normal routine; the escalation, the development of a story through challenges and conflicts for the protagonist; the climax, the highest tension point all the narration aims to; and finally the denouement, the epilogue of the story, where order is restored or a new one is created. (Duncan and Smith, 2017, 22 – 24)

Thus, the graphic novel sets a compromise between readership and authorship, a tight relationship where the latter delivers part of the message it wants to convey while the former actively participates in decoding that message.

To get its final shape, though, the graphic novel had to undergo significant changes in its structure before reaching recognition and success.

1.3.2. A brief history of the graphic novel

Defying all traditional literary conventions, the graphic novel had to fight long and hard to get its legitimate place in the literary canon. Popular belief has it that the graphic novel is one of the newest media on the market. However, according to McCloud, we can trace its beginnings about thirty-two centuries ago, in Egypt, in a scene inscribed in a tomb of an ancient scribe, or in a pre-Columbian picture manuscript, found by Cortés in 1519 but much older than that. The Bayeux Tapestry (second half of the eleventh century) and medieval illustrated manuscripts (such as The Tortures of Saint

Erasmus, 1460) can be added to the list. (McCloud, 1993, 10 – 15) However,

comics and graphic novels in their modern structure date back to eighteenth-century England, where William Hogarth, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson were experimenting with elements that would become essential for graphic novels much later, such as sequential panels creating a sort of narration. Another proto-comics artist was Laurence Sterne with his novel

Tristram Shandy (1759), where illustrations were part of the narrative. They

were included by Sterne himself and were essential for readers to understand the book. Fundamental to the development of comics was Rodolphe Töpffer, a Swiss professor who, in the early nineteenth century, wrote Histoire de

Monsieur Jabot, building a narrative through dynamic and sketchy drawings

placed inside panels of different dimensions, where characters’ words were inscribed into white balloons. This form of narration started to catch on in magazines in France, England and Germany, where Wilhelm Busch’s comics

Marx and Moritz definitely established the connection between comics and

children. (Tabachnick, 2017, 26 – 28)

Finally, the new medium reached America. This was the first period of American comics, which lasted from 1890 till 1930. At the time, America was a favourite destination for immigrants, and newspapers of that period used comics to reach that part of the audience which did not understand English

well. Because of this connection to immigrants and children’s entertainment, comics were always considered mere entertainment with simplistic themes. Nonetheless, those comics actually were concerned with important topics, such as the difficulties of immigrants to fit into American society, maybe in a light-hearted way. (Tabachnick, 2017, 28)

The second period of comics spans the years 1930 to 1950, embracing one of the darkest periods of American history, with the Great Depression and the Second World War. Difficult times called for drastic measures, and superheroes were invented. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Captain America dealt with pressing social and political issues, crime, conflict and evil. Their superpowers levelled them to gods and reflected America’s conception of itself as a superpower. After WWII, comic book writers focused on less serious topics, such as romance, crime, horror and sci-fi. However, such topics started to be considered misleading and damaging to young audiences and the anti-comics psychologist Fredric Wertham at the head of a special committee established the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulatory censoring body which banished scenes of bloodshed, and words such as “horror” and “terror” from comic books. (Tabachnick, 2017, 29) As unfair as this act can seem, in retrospect it was one of the biggest and most important steps in the development of graphic novels. During the third period of American comics, which runs from 1945 to 1975, the censorship led to the birth of Mad, a satirical magazine specifically addressed to grown-ups and therefore free from the restriction of the Comics Code Authority. Inside the magazine, comics flourished especially as a satire against American institutions and society, placing Mad as one of the most important instigators of the cultural revolution of the following decades. Furthermore, another comics movement sprang from censorship, as a sign of rebellion against traditional social conventions: counter-culture comix. These comix (spelled with an “x” on purpose) were infused with sex, drug-use and rock ‘n’ roll, anti-social characters, outrageous satire and overt political statements in

order to break as many taboos as possible. All of this opened the way to the graphic novel, which came into being in the early 1970s. (Tabachnick, 2017, 29 – 30)

Cartoonist Will Eisner was the pioneer of the graphic novel (and also the one who popularised the term) with his collection of short stories A Contract with

God and Other Tenement Stories (1978). His primary goal was to reach a wider

audience than that of comics, writing mature stories with private and personal ideas, marking the difference from the light-hearted, funny comics people were used to. Thanks to the impulse of underground comics such as those of R. Crumb, Eisner gave an autobiographic account of New York neighbourhoods he knew since he was young in a stark, direct way, creating a landmark for the evolution of the form. (Tabachnick, 2017, 35 – 38; Weiner, 2017, 41 – 42)

Following Eisner’s example, creators in the next decade wrote stories directed to an adult readership that seemed to appreciate Eisner’s turn. The first to fully realise Eisner’s idea of the graphic novel was Art Spiegelman with his work Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986), where he recounted the imprisonment of his parents in German concentration camps, their escape to America and his mother’s suicide. Together with Spiegelman, another two important adult-oriented graphic novels served to boost the reputation of the medium: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986) and Frank Miller’s

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), both politically charged superhero

reinventions embracing vigilante justice. All three of them were milestones that aided the graphic novel to get its righteous recognition as a work of art and not just mere childish entertainment. The growing attention of newspapers and critics towards graphic novels inevitably affected the publishing industry, and when reviews started to appear in some specialized journals, the entertainment industry also noticed the changing role of comics. The cinema actively seized this opportunity and started producing the first